IBM Acquires Mainframe Virtualization Management Vendor

IBM announced it intends to acquire CSL International, a provider of virtualization management technology for IBM's zEnterprise system. CSL International is a privately held company headquartered in Herzliya Pituach, Israel. Financial terms will not be disclosed.

IBM says the acquisition will enable it to offer simplified management of virtualization environments, a key foundation of cloud environments. CSL International's CSL-WAVE software provides an interface for monitoring and managing z/VM and Linux on System z environments. The software is designed to rapidly create, discover, visualize and connect virtual servers to resources.

"As clients create smarter computing environments, they are looking for ways to manage IT costs and complexity without sacrificing security or the ability to scale," says Greg Lotko, IBM business line executive for System z. “The response by clients to the advantages of Linux on System z have been tremendous, with the shipped capacity nearly doubling in the first quarter year to year. With the acquisition of CSL International, IBM expands its cloud virtualization capabilities, making it even easier for clients to take advantage of Linux on System z."

The zEnterprise System enables clients to host the workloads of thousands of commodity servers on a single system, and the combination with CSL International technologies will help administrators manage various aspects of z/VM and Linux on System z virtualization, including CPU, memory, storage, and network resources.

Virtualization has been designed into the fabric of the System z architecture since its inception nearly 50 years ago. IBM offers expansive scalability with a shared-everything design point for maximum utilization of computing resources.